Your life is packed full of all types of alerts. You get emails, text messages, push notifications, and phone calls all the time begging for your attention. If you're feeling a little overwhelmed, blogger and founder of DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg suggests reducing those alerts down to only the actionable ones.

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In some ways that's easier said then done since by their nature it's hard to tell which alerts are going to be actionable and which aren't. For Weinberg, it's about the reducing the amount of news:

At odds is the fact that I like to stay abreast of a lot of things, e.g. what people are saying about our company, what's going on in startup land, what's going on with our servers, what people are working on inside DuckDuckGo, etc. For the most part, I'm notified of developments via alerts — most via email, but some via txt and chat as well.

To solve for this he reduced the frequency of some alerts, set specific delivery times for some, and aggregated others. It sounds like a difficult task to accomplish, but it's not impossible. If your busy and can't act on something, our own Adam Pash's Quiet Hours is a great tool that will shut down and restart apps on your computer for a set amount of time to reduce the amount of alerts. Combine that with our guide to automating your iPhone and Android and you can control the time messages leak through to you.

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Of course, you can't control everything, but the real takeaway is that you can effectively ignore any alerts or notifications you get that aren't actionable. File them away for a later look or delete them altogether.